


ugly sweaters and diamond rings

by Fluffifullness



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Cuddling & Snuggling, Fix-It, Fluff, M/M, Marriage Proposal, a sequel/coda to my ghost fic but it can stand alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:53:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21945406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fluffifullness/pseuds/Fluffifullness
Summary: “Well,” Richie hedges, dropping his gaze to the empty plate in his hands. Eddie watches him take a slow, deep breath that leaves his voice soft as snowfall. “I have something for you, actually.”(Reddie Christmas fluff)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 20
Kudos: 313





	ugly sweaters and diamond rings

**Author's Note:**

> While this fic can pretty easily stand alone, it's intended to be a coda/sequel to [and i will not remember that i ever felt the pain](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20604956/chapters/48922592), so if you read that one, here's hoping you'll like this little addition!

Richie will never understand why seemingly every airport in America insists on separating their hard plastic seats with immovable armrests that are way too narrow to comfortably rest any actual human arms on. As belligerent as some people get over delays and cancellations and missed flights, you’d think they’d want to make it easier to stretch out for a quick nap – but then again, that’s probably what the giant bar in the center of the concourse is for. Liquid holiday cheer, overpriced and watered down for your pre-flight enjoyment.

There’s a joke about spirits in there somewhere; Richie files it away for later.

When Eddie’s phone vibrates for the fourth or fifth time in less than half an hour, he doesn’t even throw his hands up at the ceiling or swear loudly enough to earn them any more dirty looks from the mother sitting several seats away. He just sighs – a little theatrically, but only a little – and shows Richie the notification about their latest ten-to-fifteen-minute flight delay. 

“Think they’re waiting for it to start snowing?” Richie wonders with a stupid little grin. Eddie shoots him a halfhearted glare, but there’s a smile trying to slip through.

“You better use this for something,” he huffs. “So our suffering doesn’t go to waste.”

“What, do a bit about flying?”

“Oh, don’t tell me,” Eddie says, already scrolling through his dizzyingly long list of alarms to find the one he’s been repeatedly adjusting as a five-minutes-before-boarding reminder. “Low-hanging fruit?”

“No fruit is too low-hanging for stand-up,” Richie says, purposely using a tone that implies it’s a common adage in his line of work. It’s not, but it might as well be, and it gets a laugh out of Eddie. “Pretty sure John Mulaney’s got that market cornered, though.”

“You’re funnier than him,” Eddie disagrees offhandedly as he slips his phone back into his jacket pocket. Richie breaks into an ear-to-ear grin almost before he’s processed the compliment.

“Aw, Eds! That’s even sweeter because it’s totally not true,” he coos, pressing a sloppy kiss to Eddie’s cheek. 

Eddie laughs again and shoves playfully at him. “It wasn’t true before you started performing your own stuff, I’ll give you that. But for the hundredth time, you were fucking amazing last night, and I’m  _ not  _ just saying that because it was partly about me. Although I am,” he says, kissing Richie’s cheek a little more demurely, “very lucky.”

“Stop,” Richie groans, drawing the vowel out obnoxiously and sinking back into the coat he has draped over his seat. He can’t for the life of him stop smiling. Eddie throws an arm around Richie’s shoulders and discreetly thumbs away a tear before it can escape the corner of his eye. After more than a year, the gesture is as familiar as the happy tears themselves. It’s just too much, sometimes – too much joy for one body to hold without bursting, like the emotional equivalent of having a giant feast after weeks of fasting. He knows Eddie gets a kick out of getting him all worked up – in more ways than one,  _ hah –  _ but this is one thing he rarely actually comments on.

He also rarely misses his chance to brush away the tears – or kiss them away, when it’s just the two of them, or just the two of them and the Losers.

Eddie sighs – contentedly, this time – and lets his head fall onto Richie’s shoulder. Richie is sure the stupid armrest must be bruising the hell out of his ribs, but Eddie doesn’t seem to care. His eyes slip shut like he could just about fall asleep on Richie in spite of all the shit going on around them. The awful chairs, the headache-inducing lights, the airline employees’ garbled voices booming through tinny speakers overhead – a brief reprieve from the neverending onslaught of overplayed Christmas music that still only adds to the drone of several hundred people making calls and plans and conversation.

He couldn’t be happier to be one of them, though, Richie thinks to himself as he follows the gentle rise and fall of Eddie’s chest for a moment. Two of them. The heat’s turned up too high by their gate, but neither of them has taken off the matching Christmas sweaters Richie bought for them.

Eddie can complain that they make them look like elementary school teachers-slash-old women all he wants; Richie’s seen him crack that adorable grin of his more than once when he lets his gaze linger on the loud snowman- and Christmas tree-embroidered fabric.

The high-pitched screeching of kids roughhousing cuts through the rest of the noise – not enough to disturb Eddie, apparently, but enough to get Richie to tear his eyes away and cast a semi-reluctant glance in the direction of the mom and her two kids.

He’s a little relieved that she isn’t paying any attention to him and Eddie; if anything, she’s probably just glad that they’ve quieted down a little, and besides that she seems to have her hands full.

He looks elsewhere before that has time to change. There’s a businessman holding a briefcase in one hand and gesturing at the help desk attendant with the other. The exchange doesn’t look particularly heated yet, but that might just be because the travel assistant is good at her job.

That, or too sick of the holiday rush to rise to provocation.

Richie wonders if she’s the one who made a weak attempt at decorating the desk and the little wall behind it. There’s a string of hastily tacked-up tinsel framing the screens, a little more adorning the front of the counter, where the businessman’s briefcase keeps brushing it, and a few tissue paper snowflakes in blue and white scattered around. One of them looks like it’s barely hanging on to the sliver of scotch tape it was hung with.

It looks like most of Richie’s efforts to introduce a little festivity to the various apartments he’s lived in through the years, except that he never even got as far as cutting snowflakes out of paper. He should suggest it to Eddie, though; it could be fun, if they can find any more wall space to hang them afterward. 

Even if they  _ can’t _ , really.

Two Christmases running, and Richie’s still surprised by how much more motivated he is to decorate now that he’s got another person to enjoy it with. So take  _ that, _ twenty-something Richie who never felt like it was worth the trouble.

You’ll get there eventually, bud.

“Hey, Rich?”

“Hey, Eds?” Richie echoes, reaching up to ruffle Eddie’s hair just so he can enjoy smoothing it back down again.

Eddie gives him that fondly exasperated look that only  _ kind of  _ unintentionally encourages him to keep doing whatever he’s been doing to earn it; Richie sneaks one more quick look around before settling back into playing with Eddie’s hair.

Eddie closes his eyes again and hums a little, so Richie must have read that look just right. He swears he can feel the low vibration even in the tips of his fingers; it’s so much like a purr that it takes most of the heat out of Eddie’s next words.

“Let’s never fly with these assholes again.”

Richie gives him a toothy grin he knows Eddie will be able to hear in his voice when he laughs and says, “Copy that, Eddie Spaghetti.”

As if to spite them both, Eddie’s phone chooses that second to vibrate. Eddie groans and pulls it out of his pocket just long enough to glare at the screen before wordlessly shoving it back where it came from.

“…It’s delayed again, isn’t it.”

“Thirty more minutes,” Eddie confirms.

“Fuck, we are  _ never  _ flying with these assholes again.”

-*-

“Food’s here!” Eddie calls over his shoulder, using his foot to awkwardly guide the door shut behind the delivery guy. Any sudden moves, and the precariously stacked takeout containers could easily burst free of their brown paper bag prisons. They’d been  _ planning  _ to order too much, but this might actually be  _ too  _ too much; they could feed the entire Losers’ Club with this spread and still have leftovers.

It’s probably for the best that Bill’s the one hosting Christmas dinner tomorrow night, or they’d be in real danger of filling their refrigerator to capacity.

The look on Richie’s face when he rounds the corner from the kitchen and sees Eddie’s armloads of food somehow makes it all seem perfectly reasonable. He’s been nearly as jittery as Eddie all day, so it’s sort of a relief to see him light up brighter than their Christmas tree.

“Perfect,” he laughs, hurrying over to take one of the bags off Eddie. He also takes advantage of his newly-unobstructed access to go in for a quick kiss.

“Don’t drop it,” Eddie warns, but he’s doing a terrible job of stifling his own laughter. The remaining bag crinkles ominously in his arms, so he makes a beeline for the coffee table and starts setting up. Normally, he’d insist on keeping the food in the kitchen, well away from the furniture and their hurricane of a dog, but this is a special occasion.

More special than Richie knows just yet, which is probably why he gives Eddie a curious look as he joins him and then goes to retrieve the wine from the kitchen counter. He flicks off the overhead lights on his way back, leaving the whole living room bathed in nothing but the warm glow of Christmas lights, some of which pulse on and off at slow, even intervals.

All the romance of candlelight with none of the danger of open flames. It’s like something out of a catalogue, tacky paper snowflakes and all.

“So, what are we watching?” Richie asks. No sooner do the couch cushions beside Eddie dip under his added weight than a little ball of fur hurtles into the narrow space between them.

Eddie obligingly scratches behind Cujo’s ears, making a show of keeping Richie waiting while he wrestles with the pros and cons of every possible way this could go. Pick a movie himself so he can count on something appropriately romantic to set the mood? But he’d already more or less settled on making sure Richie chooses something he’ll genuinely enjoy. Eddie knows full well that, left to his own devices, Richie’s likely to pick something like  _ Die Hard _ if he picks a Christmas movie at all, but he also knows that seeing Richie happy will do more to take the edge off his own nerves than any Hallmark movie ever could.

He could skip the movie entirely and give it to him now, over wine and a moderately alarming amount of Indian food. It’s quieter like this, and they’re both wide awake. 

But he can’t  _ rush  _ it, right? Shouldn’t he wait for the perfect moment?

Maybe he should have rehearsed this, after all. Maybe he should’ve made reservations at the best restaurant in the city, given Richie some reason to expect a surprise—

Richie laughs and steals Eddie’s hand away from Cujo, who whines in protest.

“Tough question, huh?” 

Eddie blinks at him, and then down at Richie’s fingers. Ring size ten-and-a-half, of that much, at least, Eddie’s positive. 

He’s also positive that he should actually answer Richie’s question this time, which is hard because his thoughts are suddenly very scattered.

“…What?”

Richie gives Eddie’s hand a little squeeze and looks away to eye a styrofoam container of samosas for a moment. He’s getting all fidgety again, Eddie realizes with a touch of concern. It isn’t until Cujo starts nosing at their joined hands that Richie finally turns back to Eddie, and even then he doesn’t quite manage to sit still or maintain steady eye contact.

“Feel free to eat some,” Eddie says, because he’s at a momentary loss for anything else to say. He nods pointedly at the thing of samosas, hoping to make the non sequitur seem just a little more natural.

Richie gives him a horrified look. “Eat our beloved dog? Eddie, how could you even suggest such a thing?”

Eddie snorts, and just like that, the tension breaks. “Fuck you, you’re scaring her. Look, look – see? Her eyes are all bulgy.”

“That’s just how she looks, you bully!” Richie cries in mock indignation.

“No, she’s scared because  _ you  _ want to make curry out of her!” Eddie insists in between bouts of breathless laughter. Cujo gives them both an unimpressed look and hops down to retreat to her dog bed – strategically positioned under the tree to really maximize the cuteness factor.  _ Because she’s a gift,  _ Eddie had patiently explained to Richie when he questioned the bed’s new home.

Eddie gestures at it now, raising his eyebrows in a silent  _ ‘See?’ _

Richie shakes his head, ostensibly to convey an equally silent  _ ‘That was obviously your fault, not mine’  _ and failing to really pull it off because his wide smile just makes him look fond.

“Anyway,” he says after a long, much more comfortable silence, during which they both wind up swiping and subsequently devouring a couple of veggie samosas. “If you don’t know what you wanna watch, we could always start with something else, first.”

Eddie breathes a little sigh of relief. “I’m all ears.”

“Well,” Richie hedges, dropping his gaze to the empty plate in his hands. Eddie watches him take a slow, deep breath that leaves his voice soft as snowfall. “I have something for you, actually.”

“Oh,” Eddie breathes, and maybe the oddest thing about it is that the nervousness doesn’t come rushing back. It’s not the picture-perfect, carefully-orchestrated romantic moment Eddie’s spent months going back and forth about; it’s just like so many others they’ve shared, from getting stranded in airports to cuddling over Netflix and bridging the gap between life and death. All that, and everything in between. It feels right.

Eddie takes Richie’s plate and sets it back on the table alongside his own. Richie watches him with an odd mixture of curiosity and apprehension, but Eddie doesn’t let himself dwell too much on the latter for fear of letting his own nerves catch up with him again. 

“Me, too,” he says, scooting toward the other end of the couch and pulling out the drawer on the end table. The little box is still there, of course, all neatly bound in twine and shiny gold paper. Eddie’s hands tremble slightly as he picks it up and turns it over and over, reassuring himself one last time that it looks as good as he wants it to. 

When he finally turns to let Richie see what he’s holding, he’s met with an unexpectedly similar sight.

Even with the twinkling lights of their tree reflecting off Richie’s glasses, Eddie can tell he’s watching him with rapt attention. His hands are cupped almost protectively in front of him, half-curled around the little blue box resting in his palms.

It’s roughly the same size as the one Eddie’s holding; Richie makes a soft noise when he realizes, and for a moment they just stare at each other, like they’re in the middle of some kind of Wild West showdown.

Richie winds up being faster on the draw; there’s a spark of something like amusement in his expression when he holds his box out to Eddie and says, “You first.”

They make a trade of it, one meticulously wrapped gift for another. Richie’s is surprisingly heavy for something so small, and it’s so beautifully wrapped that Eddie almost hates to pull on the ribbon binding it all together.

“Eds,” Richie murmurs. “Come on, the suspense is killing me.”

“I’m savoring the moment,” Eddie says, and then of course he goes out of his way to very slowly and delicately unwrap the gift without even slightly tearing the navy blue wrapping paper. He even folds it and sets it off to the side before finally slipping the lid off of the cardboard box underneath.

Inside is another box, but this one is much more easily identifiable.

“Oh, Rich, you didn’t,” Eddie gasps, pulling it out and clasping it in both hands. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so he does both, just a little.

“I didn’t if you didn’t,” Richie quips, sounding nervous beyond belief. “You gonna open it?”

Eddie nods and gently pulls the velvety lid up, revealing a simple silver band with a line of blue gemstones running through the center of it. It’s—

“It’s beautiful,” Eddie breathes.

Richie perks up. “Yeah? And you’ll – you will?”

“Will what?” Eddie asks innocently. He has to resist the temptation to bat his eyelashes at Richie, who already looks enough like a deer in headlights as it is.

“Uhm,” he says, very breathlessly, “marry me?”

God, he’s so fucking cute. It takes every last ounce of self-restraint Eddie has not to throw himself at him right then and there. Instead, he presses a single finger to his chin like he’s lost in thought. Like there’s any actual question what his answer will be.

“Guess that depends on how you like yours,” he says, dropping his gaze to the box in Richie’s hand. 

Richie absolutely does not fail to notice the big, dopey grin Eddie can’t swallow down, and there’s that sparkle in his own eyes again as he first tries to unwrap his gift as carefully as Eddie had before ultimately giving up and just tearing into it. 

When he sees the ring Eddie picked for him, his eyes well up with tears even faster than Eddie’s had.  _ Classic Richie, _ Eddie thinks. Emotions are all such full-body experiences for him. If anything, he’s become more of an open book since Derry. 

Eddie uses the sleeve of his sweater to gently dab at some of the tears. Richie sniffles, and laughs, and Eddie says, “Yes, I’ll marry you. I’ll marry the shit out of you, oh my god.”

There are still more tears coming when Richie catches Eddie by the hand. Eddie expects to be pulled in for a kiss, but Richie just holds him still for a long moment instead, just looking at him. Just savoring the moment.

Then he takes the ring from Eddie and slips it onto his finger. Eddie watches with bated breath; it fits perfectly, like it’s been there all his life. Eddie flexes his fingers a few times, just marveling at the way it looks, and then he takes Richie’s hand and does the same with his band – gold, because Richie is nothing if not warm, and a little showier than Eddie’s, because that kind of thing suits Richie best, and Eddie wouldn’t have him any other way.

“Think it goes well with my sweater?” Richie asks, holding his hand up to the woolen monstrosity Eddie loves so much.

“Absolutely nothing goes well with these,” Eddie says, tugging emphatically at his own sweater like it’s personally offended him. “They’re whatever the polar opposite of fashion is.”

“Like you’d know. We got more compliments on them yesterday than either of us gets any other day of the year. That’s fashion.”

“That’s because there’s nothing else to look at in an airport,” Eddie says, already guiding Richie back down onto the couch. “And people think it’s cute that we match.”

“Well, to be fair”—

“It is cute,” Eddie admits, taking Richie’s face in both hands and drawing him into a slow kiss to stifle whatever  _ gotcha  _ response was almost certainly coming. 

When he starts to pull away, Richie drags him back down, and Eddie goes all the more willingly because he can feel the cool-but-slowly-warming metal of Richie’s engagement ring against the skin of his cheek. He just  _ melts. _

“God, I love you,” he whispers against Richie’s throat, enjoying the little shiver it earns him. 

“Enough to watch  _ Krampus  _ with me before our food gets cold?”

“…Yes, but only  _ just.” _

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Holidays, everyone!!


End file.
